In Which High Society Baltimore Women Stole Patients from an Asylum to be their Indentured Maids

The Rosewood Center was opened in 1888 in Owings Mills, just outside Baltimore, as a home for the "feeble minded," and closed just a few years ago. Jesse Bering has the astonishing tale of its great scandal:

Like many overwhelmed psychiatric facilities built around the turn of the last century, Rosewood had been dogged by shameful accusations for a long time. The most scandalous—the one that sets Rosewood apart from other asylums—was made by Leo Kanner on May 13, 1937. Before a hushed gathering at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Pittsburgh, Kanner shared the shocking tale of “the Rosewood girls.” . . . For more than 20 years, some of Baltimore’s wealthiest and most established families had been helping themselves to the institutionalized patients at Rosewood. They’d been “adopting” these mentally challenged girls and women only to turn them into their own private slaves. . . .

Kanner found that an astonishing 166 patients left Rosewood under habeas corpus writs from 1911 to 1933, with nothing at all to indicate the oddly obliging judges’ criteria for their decisions. And when Kanner and a diligent social worker named Mabel Kraus looked into the matter further, they confirmed that these girls, women, and a few boys had not only been legally snatched from Rosewood right under everyone’s noses, but they’d been bought by the rich as unpaid laborers and indentured servants. It was a well-oiled human trafficking operation.

Of course the employment of the feeble minded as servants often did not go well, and many of these women were soon turned out by their employers and ended up on the street.

Kanner and Kraus tracked down most of the former residents of Rosewood to determine what had become of them since their releases. It wasn’t a pretty picture. The vast majority had indeed gone to reside with those “society matrons” who, under the pretense of providing them with a loving home, had in fact paid Wolf or the other unscrupulous lawyers to obtain a resident of their choosing. Most got more than they bargained for. “Many of the women soon became dissatisfied with their maids and expressed great astonishment that the girls seemed ‘stupid’ and ‘slow,’ ” Kanner told his colleagues in Pittsburgh. “This discovery, however, did not deter them from ordering another girl from Lawyer I when they got rid of the one they had.” One lady had a change of mind about a particular Rosewood girl the moment she left the courtroom, leaving her confused new charge in the parking lot. Another intended her adoptee to be a personal housemaid for just two months, kicking her out when the family left for a European vacation. . . .

Once they proved poor housekeepers, the women were eventually tossed out on the streets. And here, things got even grimmer—the former Rosewood girls saw “a sad peregrination through the whorehouses and flophouses of the slums,” as a student of Kanner’s would write many years later. For the original 1937 report, social worker Kraus had managed to track down 102 of the 166 habeas corpus cases on record. She found that 11 women (all of whom had been in perfect health when they left Rosewood) had died of illness or neglect; 17 were plagued by infectious diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhea, or tuberculosis; 29 were prostitutes; eight had been reinstitutionalized in mental hospitals; and six were in prison for serious crimes. 

But before you decide that Leo Kanner was a great hero, I should mention that he was a big eugenicist, and that the thing that upset him the most about this affair was that these women had been released back in to the breeding pool, where they had given birth to at least 165 children.